Part of Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks 1 (NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks 2021) round1
Daniel Galvez, Greg Diamos, Juan Torres, Keith Achorn, Juan Cerón, Anjali Gopi, David Kanter, Max Lam, Mark Mazumder, Vijay Janapa Reddi
The People’s Speech is a free-to-download 31,400-hour and growing supervised conversational English speech recognition dataset licensed for academic and commercial usage under CC-BY-SA. The data is collected via searching the Internet for appropriately licensed audio data with existing transcriptions. We describe our data collection methodology and release our data collection system under the Apache2.0 license. We show that a model trained on this dataset achieves a 32.17% word error rate on Librispeech’s test-clean test set. Finally, we discuss the legal and ethical issues surrounding the creation of a sizable machine learning corpora and plans for continued maintenance of the project under MLCommons’s sponsorship.